to think this proves my point?

[WhatTheWhat]

With baby just starting proper food, I read somewhere that peanut butter in small quantities is a good first food.
So I bought some SunPat.
When I checked the label, I saw it contains hydrogenated vegetable fat - ie a transfat - which is super dooper unhealthy.
I wrote to SunPat (Premier Foods) ask why and to say please remove this from something you market to kids.
Their response was (paraphrased) "The Food Standards Agency has not required us to remove trans fats, so we haven't. But since consumers increasingly don't like them, we're slowly taking them out of our products".
Which to my mind means - yes you're completely right, this is bad and we're starting to do something about it.
Anyway - Mum alert - SunPat contains trans fats!!!
Wiki on trans fats

What's wrong with palm oil?

It kills orang-utans innit (there may be other thing I don[t wrong that I am not privvy to)

@ nomedoit ... or elbow-grease lol

Gawd, got totally distracted half way through that post by an eggy soldier, sorry for the illiteracy!

Palm oil is very high in saturated fats and plam oil plantations are leading to nastry monoculture in rainforest places.

Most brands of peanut butter are crap nutritionally, too high in sugar for a start. Look out for Whole Earth brand, they are the genuine low-additives article.

Isn't "Plumpynut" - the stuff that aid agencies use for malnourished children effectively a kind of peanut butter? (not that you can buy that in the shops) Bit of a non sequitur, but shows that it's got good stuff in it.

oh, now I see the bit about palm oil in Whole Earth brand.
Phooey :(.

thatsnotmymonkey - it's even worse when we run out of cous cous. I have to get straight in the 4x4 and nip down to waitrose to restock. :o

"@diddl - you're supposed to spread it really, really thin at first."

Yes of course-but it still has that dry/cloying consistency.

Maybe a bit of jam with it!

Old fashioned peanut butter was just peanuts ground smooth. The oil/fat came from the peanuts themselves.

For some reason I thought this was still the case. More fool me.

YABVU to think for even one moment that any food product is not made in different ways from different ingredients by different manufacturers.

It's not fucking rocket science:
i) pour handful plain peanuts into blender
ii) press "ON"
iii) eat

No one should buy sun pat because it tastes of arse. Transfats don't even come in to it.

((contemplates a move back to Florida for the tenthousandth time this morning))

Thats how I make mine SkiHorse, cheap and bloody delicious

PB has a stupid amount of fat in it. Highly inappropriate first food for a baby. Where on earth did you hear that? I have never read that before and have read lots of weaning advice.

@massive I wish I could get out more! And I wish I had blender!
Off to buy some hand knitted lentils.
xx

Babies need fat, and PB couldn't be more appropriate for small children. How about you ditch the weaning books and use a bit of common sense.

Babies need fat from full fat milk and other dairy, why don't we just give them some burgers and chips?

oh! how i miss peanut butter!
my first two kids loved it, and there is nothing better for them than a wholewheat toast and good quality peanut butter!

but, we have been peanut free for 13 years....due to allergy.

certainly a healthy option for those with low risk for allergies.

we cant have peanut butter or marmite/some other foods in the house due to allergies.

I seem to remember making nut butters by pulverizing them in the food processor with a little bit of oil and salt. Cashew nuts make lovely nut butter.

so much going on in the world and this is a shocker......I never gave peannut butter to my dc until they were quite a bit older- not worrth the allergy risk.

FFS, dairy isn't the only good source of fat! Is an avocado the same as burgers and chips? Or olive oil? Or, in fact, oil from peanuts?

Just feed them dust. Joyless food police.

I get a bit fucked off with all the new mega unhealthy stuff they discover year after year (MSG, TRANS-FAT ETC) To be fair it was the stuff we were all brought up on and most of us are still alive. Personally I give all my kids PNB regularly and I really am not worried .... enough to do stopping them killing themselves in other ways until they are 18 (and no longer my responsibility!)! eg. falling out out of trees, bicycle crashes, rolling down stairs, fire, electrocution etc.. etc..

we have the crunchy version of this one It has no palm oil or trans fats.

Don't you lose a lot of peanuts to the blender if you grind yourself (high wastage)? And I suppose it doesn't keep so well (though you could add salt).

Hydrog. fats haven't been around that long, they are a long term risk in that they fill arteries and that takes decades to observe, and hydrog. fats have only been around less than 70 years, and we have only been so likely to eatq processed foods in last 50 years, so we are only just really getting the idea of what they do. Some trans fats we humans can probably deal with (at the rates they naturally occur in meat, etc.), but not at the volume they occur in long-life shelf foods.

The other thing about palm oil is that a lot of rainforest is actually been cleared to make plantations of it :(. Remember those big fires in Indonesia a few years ago? That was mostly to clear land that has become palm oil plantations :(.